Obergefell’s Second Decade

“…It has become received wisdom by the legal intelligentsia that the Supreme Court is illegitimate. They charge that the conservative justices are engaging in politicized decisions that advance Republican causes, which have no grounding in law. Critics blast the Court for not following procedural regularity and deciding important issues on the so-called “shadow” docket. This mantra is repeated so often that jurisdiction stripping, Court packing, or worse seems like a fait accompli when progressives regain power. Yet, these Court critics seem to have forgotten much of the past century. During the most convulsive days of the Warren Court, progressive elites raised no alarms. Rather, they celebrated as Chief Justice Earl Warren and his colleagues rewrote virtually every aspect of our legal order, from criminal law to religion to sexual privacy to election law and more. And all of this was done without even the slightest pretense of legal justification, beyond the justices’ personal preference for what would make a more just society…”